"The café-bar-restaurant on Jalan Kemang Raya rests like an elegant fish tank above the bookstore. It has large windows through which you can look down on lounging tukang parkir as they laugh and suck on their clove cigarettes. If you sit on the retro living room ensemble in the right place at the right time and look beyond the car park, you can watch all of Kemang creep by in one long neverending traffic jam. This is the story of the origin of that traffic jam; at a time in the distant past when the traffic used to roam free and a trip from Blok M to Jalan Kemang Selatan used to take ten minutes at most."

A Girl & A Guy in a Kijang in Kemang is a story from my book, We Rose Up Slowly. The story was written in 2012 and published in Eastern Heathens (Ethos Books, 2013, edited by Ng Yi Sheng & Amanda Lee Koe).